Enna for Nokia N900 is out

Good news everyone ! I recently ‘ve been sponsored Nokia N900 phone by CELF, this awesome pro-Linux foundation that already used to sponsor me DLNA specifications a few years back. The idea of course was to start porting our software to ARM-based devices. Nokia N900 phone is a great toy. It features an OMAP3 SoC (ARM Cortex-A8 CPU associated with an SGX GPU that can handle OpenGL|ES) and is running Maemo 5 distribution (soon to be replaced by Meego), a Debian-derivated by Nokia. The idea behind all this of course was to port Enna (and its associated dependencies, i.e. libplayer, libnfo and libvalhalla) on this system and optimize the hell out of it :-)

This is now done. Kudos to myself :p

There are still room for way more optimizations. Enna has been ported, that’s a fact. The underlying dependencies can however be improved a lot. The EFL can use either X11 or OpenGL for output. Right now, we’re still using plain X11. It’s not really optimized but I’m not yet fully convinced of the OpenGL|ES port so it’ll stay this way for a still a while. Also, libplayer on N900 has been configured to use MPlayer. While this perfectly works, it uses CPU (with all possible ARM VFP and NEON optimizations though) for software decoding instead of using the hardware DSP. As a result, it can decode much more audio and video formats than the default embedded played allows to, but it’s also slower. I have multiple possibilities to make use of this DSP (through Maemo MAFW video API or using OpenMAX) and have not yet settled my choice.

Anyhow, everyone should now be able to try out out Enna v0.4.0 on his phone, provided he has one Nokia N900 of course :-)

In order to install it, go to Package Manager and add a new repository: